Exoskeletons Walk the Floor at Army's D.C. Expo [Updated]

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Exoskeletons Walk the Floor at Army's D.C. Expo [Updated]

"Hey," an officer asks his friends as they stroll by the men wearing exoskeletons, "you guys like robots?"

It's a salient question at this year's Washington, D.C., conference of the Association of the U.S. Army. Standing next to mock-ups of a Javelin missile and a model drone are Russ Angold and Keith Maxwell, who wear 82 pounds' worth of Lockheed Martin's revamped experimental exoskeleton, known as the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC. Lockheed has a $1.1 million contract with the Army to see if it makes sense to outfit the soldiers of the future with the electrically powered hydraulic suits.

For now, Angold – a co-founder of Berkeley Bionics, which developed the HULC for Lockheed – and Maxwell stroll the floor of the Lockheed pavilion, attracting gawkers who want to see what men wearing backpack-and-leg-brace robosuits under their combat fatigues can do. Angold's model has a load-bearing bar strapped to the back of his device and looping over his shoulders and neck.

He gestures at a 94-pound black steel shield – it looks like a piece of extremely heavy riot-control gear – that I'm able to lift about a foot off the ground for an embarrassingly short period of time. Angold straps it to his HULC's load bar and stands upright, carrying on a conversation for 10 minutes. He says he feels nothing as the exoskeleton transfers the weight to the ground.

Since July 2009, Lockheed's worked to "ruggedize" the suits at its training facility in Orlando, which is to say the company's beaten the exoskeleton up. The suits are immersible in water for an hour. Sand and powdered dust, ubiquitous in Afghanistan, can enter the exoskeleton without wearing down its batteries.

"Nothing is ever soldier-proof," Maxwell says. "If you build a hammer, they'll find a way to break it."

But the idea of the exoskeleton is that troops should be able to lift up to 200 pounds with the HULC and sprint up to 7 miles per hour while wearing it, without the lithium-ion batteries dying until a 20-kilometer (12½-mile) march is complete.

The system's six batteries, weighing a total of 18 pounds, can be recharged in any Humvee. Walking around the convention floor, they'd have a battery life of between three and four days.

The HULC isn't a weapons system: You won't find any guns or missiles strapped to it, although the company doesn't rule out weaponizing it, if that's ultimately what the government wants. It's designed to help soldiers haul heavy cargo and hump their gear without murdering their backs and knees.

For now, James Ni, the HULC's program manager, says he just wants to "seal up all the compartments," both physically and electromagnetically, so the exoskeleton doesn't break down in the mountains of Afghanistan or emit a radiating noise like Blackberrys can. It's more adjustable to soldiers' various body types now, the result of four years' worth of research and development. The sensors that react to wearers' motion commands make a slight whir as the hydraulics propel Maxwell and Angold around the floor.

Next up for the HULC is to see how soldiers perform with and without it. By the spring of 2011, Lockheed plans to outfit squads with the exoskeleton to gauge its utility and collect feedback. And by 2012, Ni says he wants to deploy the HULC to Lockheed's contractors in Afghanistan to see how they perform with it during logistics work.

But Ni, Maxwell and other Lockheed representatives on hand demur when asked about the system's ultimate cost, aside from generically talking about how cost "efficiencies" are a priority. That's in line with an underlying theme of this year's conference: The Army's going to have less money to buy the gear of the future than during the fat years of the last decade.

But no one, contractor or Army officer, is giving many specifics so far about just how they'll cut back – just that they intend to. Lockheed has competition in the exoskeleton field from Raytheon, which recently unveiled its XOS 2 wearable robot.

Still, this week, Lockheed's exoskeletons are literally strutting around the Washington Convention Center. Asked what happens when the HULC gets knocked over, Maxwell quickly drops to his knees and leans forward, the full weight of 82 pounds of HULC not phasing him.

"This should be a stress position," he says, "what you do to someone you don't like." Instead, he gets down to a prone position, lying on his stomach in the exoskeleton, and then shoots back up. The only weight he feels: "the heat" from the 45 pounds of body armor he's wearing – or, rather, that the HULC carries.

Update, Tuesday, October 26: This post originally misidentified Russ Angold, who's a co-founder and vice president of Berkeley Bionics.